Sex and gender in the British Empire, anyone?

In 440 BC, the Greek historian Herodotus of Halicarnassus broke with tradition by collecting primary sources and then systematically and critically arranging them into a narrative. In doing so, he essentially established the genre of objective historical writing, earning himself the epithet of the ‘Father of History.’

According to a coterie of historians currently practising their trade in Australian universities however, this is where Herodotus went wrong. In their view, Herodotus’ The Histories is rendered null and void as an historical source because he failed to frame his discussion of the Greco-Persian Wars in terms of class, gender or race.

The proposition that history be approached as a linear sequence of events and that the history of Western Civilisation should form the basis of an undergraduate degree has become so abhorrent to some that to suggest otherwise elicits howls of laughter or a torrent of vitriol. …

Of the 746 history subjects currently taught across 35 universities, 244 reduce thousands of years of human history and all its nuances and complexities to the themes of class, race and gender. These are simply variations of the Marxist template used by British historian Eric Hobsbawm in the 1960s, when he deliberately re-wrote the history of the ‘long 19th century’ as being 125 years of class struggle. Hobsbawm transformed history as an academic discipline into a vehicle for social policy.